A Privacy Preserving Communication Protocol for IoT Applications in Smart Homes

The development of the Internet of Things has made extraordinary progress in recent years in both academic and industrial fields. There are quite a few smart home systems (SHSs) that have been developed by major companies to achieve home automation. However, the nature of smart homes inevitably raises security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we propose an improved energy-efficient, secure, and privacy-preserving communication protocol for the SHSs. In our proposed scheme, data transmissions within the SHS are secured by a symmetric encryption scheme with secret keys being generated by chaotic systems. Meanwhile, we incorporate message authentication codes to our scheme to guarantee data integrity and authenticity. We also provide detailed security analysis and performance evaluation in comparison with our previous work in terms of computational complexity, memory cost, and communication overhead.